I have already installed windows on my 128gb SSD following this guide and it was extremely helpful, so thanks again for that!. I just bought another SSD (Crucial M4 256gb) when it went on sale this past week. My question is I had really just wanted to use this drive for games and such. Probably install steam on it and any other games I can fit. If I am simply using this as a storage drive is there anything special I need to do to set it up? What steps of this guide if any should I follow to get it working properly and as fast as it can be?

Sean, why do you think it isn't recommended to enable NTFS compression on an SSD where the main OS is installed? Doesn't it improve performance?

Cause it is a waste, it doesn't really do much except use cpu power

Quote:

Originally Posted by Talynn67

Got the Replacement Intel 520 Series SSD. It works well though i was nervous installing windows to it so I only left 4 screws in the bottom panel of the laptop in case i had to pull it again. Intel had a few hoops to jump through, so rather then review just the drive i should be able to do a write up on the replacement processes and how painful/painless that was. All is well with it and the guide was very helpful to getting it installed and space saving set up on it. Thanks Sean!

BTW - windows 7 takes up about 18gb...not sure if I missed something...thought it should be closer to 10gb.

EDIT: I have Windows Ultimate...im sure that's the reason. And the mass amount of updates I installed...i think.

Page file and hibernation mainly. follow guide!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snakes

After Windows updates and installing about 2.5GB of software my Windows 7 Home Premium partition is 29.2GB full, not sure how it got that large. I'll have to look into that. I guess the page file is 8GB and I didn't disable system restore, that'll account for some of it. This is after running CCleaner to delete temp files. The Windows folder is 14.7GB.

Ok now I just noticed that hilighting everything in C only comes to 26.3GB. I have hidden files turned off. where did my missing 2.9GB go?

look in the maintenance section and download space sniffer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FishCommander

Does this look right? This is my second attempt

Originally is was C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86)
At least I'm pretty sure... it was definetly on the C drive and my Caviar Black is my 'D' drive.... lol im skurd

i think lol, ive never done it

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlZ

So I enabled AHCI with the registry mod and my bios settings in preparation for the SSD, now my harddrives appear on the system tray as removables, anyway to disable that with out losing performance?

I first plugged my SSD as a secondary drive so I could do a firmware update.

After the firmware was updated I followed the guide on how to install Windows 7 and some of the optimizations.

However i have few questions

1-) My keyboard acted up during the installation process and I could not follow the CONTROL A DRIVE USING A BIOS motherboard MRB format

I could not hit Shift + F10... Will this bring me any troubles? I could not allign my SSD to 4K. Am i still good to go? What i basically did was just have my brand new SSD plugged in, no HDD. and selected that SSD and installed Windows 7. I hope i did not miss on anything via that specific place in the guide

2-) I plugged in my HDD and now i have 4 drives in total.

1 is Drive C for my SSD

the other 3 are drives E F and G... How can i combine all of these 3 drives into a specific drive such as drive E? and how can i format everything?

1. no difference
2. google, lol. i think you can span the volumes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by laurelgtxyz

First wanna say thanks to Sean for the quick and easy guide on maximizing the SSD. Got my M4 running good since 1 week ago. But , there's a thing that keep bugging me about the CPU usage which i dont know why is it acting like that. As shown in the picture above , i have that RSTWmiService running all time and it is affecting my idle temp. I dont know what this thing is , I've tried re-installing windows again 4 days ago but still it stays the same. Any advice on this? I think it is from the chipset driver or something that i installed. Thanks in advance.

idk.uninstall it if it gives issue.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snooter

Hey Sean or anyone else or may know the answer to this.

I have already installed windows on my 128gb SSD following this guide and it was extremely helpful, so thanks again for that!. I just bought another SSD (Crucial M4 256gb) when it went on sale this past week. My question is I had really just wanted to use this drive for games and such. Probably install steam on it and any other games I can fit. If I am simply using this as a storage drive is there anything special I need to do to set it up? What steps of this guide if any should I follow to get it working properly and as fast as it can be?

EDIT: I installed a lot of Mobo utility programs..which I am going to uninstall right now..they seem to be bloatware...hopefully that saves me some space as well. I will also install/run Space Sniffer.
UPDATE: Just Ran SpaceSniffer...below is the simply and more detailed view...anything look wrong? Why do some of the file/folders under "winsxs" say "amd64"???? errrrrr...***?

As far as the space issue with win ultimate something must be off. When I first installed win7ultimate I followed seans guide to the letter. After installation plus ccleaner,mse,updates and only what I needed from office word,excel I was at 13gigs. That was with a 1gig page file as well and bloatware from mobo utils. Getting rid of hibernation and reducing page file cleared a ton of wasted space. Also I disabled system restore as I have regular backups to my nas in case something happens. The mobo bloatware I got rid of immediately and used revo uninstaller great program btw, to get rid of all traces. It ended up being the reason my boot up time went from 12-15s to 45. Another thing that helped was grabbing seans win updates file deletion script. Especially after u first install all the initial updates. Have fun, you have a good size drive
Thx again sean your advice/guide was priceless info. Even reading other threads in hd/ssd section pretty much every question asked is in one of your guides!

As far as the space issue with win ultimate something must be off. When I first installed win7ultimate I followed seans guide to the letter. After installation plus ccleaner,mse,updates and only what I needed from office word,excel I was at 13gigs. That was with a 1gig page file as well and bloatware from mobo utils. Getting rid of hibernation and reducing page file cleared a ton of wasted space. Also I disabled system restore as I have regular backups to my nas in case something happens. The mobo bloatware I got rid of immediately and used revo uninstaller great program btw, to get rid of all traces. It ended up being the reason my boot up time went from 12-15s to 45. Another thing that helped was grabbing seans win updates file deletion script. Especially after u first install all the initial updates. Have fun, you have a good size drive
Thx again sean your advice/guide was priceless info. Even reading other threads in hd/ssd section pretty much every question asked is in one of your guides!
Sent from my cm9 using Tapatalk 2

Dangit! I can't figure it out...I swear I did everything as well...ill re-check hibernation/system restore...but im like 99.99% I turned them both off. I also did CCleaner and deleted the Window Update trash.

Your bootup time went from 12-15s to 45s??? because you got rid of mobo bloatware?? I think you wrote that wrong - you meant the other way around?

I wonder if Windows 7 takes up more space the bigger harddrive you have? hmmmm....maybe ill google it.

EDIT: I think I know what is causing the problem...I just remembered...that there seems to be some allocated space on my harddrive...I only saw/noticed it when I went to turn off disk defrag....I will post pic when I get home...I don't know where it came from...however, it does not show up under My Computer...weiiirrrddd...Edited by malikq86 - 5/10/12 at 8:51am

Well I found some junk on my PC and was able to save some more space..right now I am using 18GB...however, I believe it should be less than that....

I did find something weird...under "Disk Defragmenter" that is a partition called "System Reserved" ....it does not show up in My Computer...is this normal or is this what has been taking up space on my SSD?!? The only drives I had/have connected to my PC ..is my SSD + Optical Drive..that's it.

Looks like it takes up 100MB..Disk Management seems to have an option to remove it...though I am not sure I should...anyone know what this is? And whether I should keep or delete it?

Yeah the system reserved partition is normal, I would just keep it. On the first page there is a guide on how to remove it when fresh installing windows and a link on how to remove it after you have installed windows.

From the first page under Booting and partitioning of Windows 7 with the System Reserve Partition:

On a fresh (custom) installation of Windows 7, where Windows 7 is installed onto a new hard disk with unallocated disk space (no partition or volume been defined yet), or when user attempts to create a new partition out of empty drive, the Windows 7 installer will create an additional partition with the size of 100MB, and mark as System Reserved.

The 100MB volume is labeled as System Reserved with NTFS file system, and System, Active, Primary partition attribute with no drive letter in Disk Management. The 100MB system partition is used primarily as BitLocker partition for BitLocker encryption. Additionally, it also holds the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) and boot files with boot manager for booting up the computer for troubleshooting when there is no Windows 7 installation DVD disc on hand.

The Windows 7 created 100MB partition is not the main boot partition or boot drive, but serve only as a backup.

For Windows 7 users who do not intend to use BitLocker, the 100MB partition can be removed subsequently and easily . However, users can stop and prevent the 100MB partition from been created in the first place during installation.